Gaming

For gaming there are only 2 things that really matter on sound cards. The first one is the quality of the surround sound effects and the second one is the performance hit associated with it. And while the first one is again a subjective matter, the second is measurable and 100% reproducible.

Test System

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo x6800 @ 2.93Ghz
Motherboard: Asus P5N-E SLI
Audio: Auzen X-Fi Prelude 7.1 and Asus Xonar D2
Memory: 2 x 1 GB OCZ Gold 800Mhz DDR2 memory
Graphics card: ATI X1950XTX
Drivers: Current versions available on driver CDs.
Operating system used: Windows Vista Ultimate, fully updated
Software used:
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
F.E.A.R.

The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows Vista was installed. Following the completion of the installations, the video and sound drivers were installed. All windows updates were then installed as were the latest builds of the benchmarking tools. Finally, the hard drive was de-fragmented. For each test, the Nvidia drivers were set to default quality/optimizations (unless otherwise stated).

Good Benchmarking Practice:
Where possible, each benchmark was performed 3 times and the median result for each resolution/setting is shown in the tables that will follow. All applications had their latest patches applied and all hardware features the latest BIOS/Firmware.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Thanks to the excellent OpenAl support in Windows Vista both cards sounded about equal in ET:QW. The Prelude 7.1 had a slightly clearer sound, with far off explosions more easily distinguished, as well as crisp close range sound effects. The Xonar D2 on the other hand sounded slightly muffled, but only when compared to the Prelude 7.1

Performance was a lot better on the Prelude 7.1 as well, thanks to the X-RAM feature from Creative. Instead of storing audio data in the main memory the game stored it directly into the 64MB available on the sound card, freeing up some processing time when the sounds are needed. As you can see the performance difference was quite surprising, with a good 5fps gained because of this technology.

F.E.A.R.

A much more realistic performance situation arises in F.E.A.R. Since the game doesn’t support X-RAM the extra memory on the Prelude 7.1 doesn’t come into play. As a result both cards were equally matched both performance and sound quality wise (that is to say, both sounded great).

On the Prelude 7.1 we were able to turn on EAX 5.0 HD, making the experience even better. Unfortunately the quality difference wasn’t as big as we had hoped. It was really difficult for us to determine what exactly changed when turning on the feature, but it probably had to do something with the slightly fuller sound the card was outputting. Thankfully the performance hit was minimal, so there was no reason we wouldn’t want to use the feature.